The supermom trap: Do involved dads erode moms’ self-competence?

Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands’ contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self-competence among wives. In contrast, wives’ caregiving behavior was unrelated to their husbands’ self-competence. None of these effects emerged for the self-liking component of self-esteem. Thus, despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles, employed mothers (but not their husbands) seem to be trapped between their desire for help with childrearing and the threat to their personal competence posed by failure to meet socially constructed ideals of motherhood. The women’s liberation movement ushered in a new egalitarianism wherein women of all stripes were encouraged to join the workforce. Husbands of these women have been expected to share in the task of childrearing. A corollary, albeit unstated, assumption was that employed mothers would welcome fathers’ involvement in caregiving, as this would enable them to devote much needed time to their careers. The research reported in this article represents a partial test of this corollary assumption. In particular, recognizing that child care is an important source of selfcompetence for mothers, we ask if sharing child care duties with fathers might decrease mothers’ feelings of self-competence. We set Takayuki Sasaki, JGSS Research Center, Osaka University of Commerce, Japan; Nancy L. Hazen and William B. Swann Jr., University of Texas, Austin. This article was based on Takayuki Sasaki’s master’s thesis. This research was supported by Grant SBR9212990 from the National Science Foundation and Grant 3332 from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. We are grateful to the families who participated in this study. Correspondence should be addressed to Takayuki Sasaki, JGSS Research Center, Osaka University of Commerce, 4-1-10 Mikuriya-sakaemachi, Higashi-osaka, 577-8505, Japan, e-mail: [email protected]. the stage for our analysis by describing recent changes in patterns of childrearing. Changes in the childrearing landscape Today it is not unusual for mothers to enter the paid labor force before they celebrate their baby’s first birthday. The labor force participation rates among married mothers of infants aged 1 year or younger in two-parent families became a record-high 61.8% in 1998, doubled from 30.8% in 1975, and fell slightly to 55.8% in 2005 (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1999, 2006). This dramatic burgeoning of maternal employment has not only changed the childrearing landscape but also called for a rapid modification of the father’s parenting role. But if the movement of mothers into the workforce has been dramatic, the movement of fathers into the nursery has not. Even when mothers hold a paying job, fathers still spend far less time than mothers doing housework and child care (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2006). Surprisingly, dual-earner mothers seem ambivalent about their husbands’ involvement. Indeed, employed mothers were less likely to be satisfied with child care arrangements when their husbands were a major source of child care (Glass, 1998). We were interested in the roots of such ambivalence.